These historians also seem intent on obscuring the crucial contrasts between Stalinism and Nazism.15 Whereas Stalin’s terror was arbitrary, Hitler’s was targeted at a particular group. As the German historian Eberhard Jäackel observed in an attack on Nolte and his compatriots, never before in history was a particular human group—its men, women, children, old, young, healthy, and infirm—singled out to be killed as rapidly as possible using “every possible means of state power” to do so.16 The fate of every Jew who came under German rule was essentially sealed. In contrast, no citizen of the Soviet Union assumed that deportation and death were inevitable consequences of his or her ethnic origins.17 People in the USSR did not know who might be next on Stalin’s list. This uncertainty terrorized them. By contrast, during the Nazi assault on the Jews “every single one of millions of targeted Jews was to be murdered. Eradication was to be total.”18 The Nazis did not borrow these methods from the Soviets. They were sui generis, and the refusal of these historians to acknowledge that fact reflects the same triumph of ideology over truth that we have seen throughout this study.
This is not a matter of comparative pain or competitive suffering. It is misguided to attempt to gauge which group endured more. For the victims in all these tragedies the oppressors’ motives were and remain irrelevant. Nor is this a matter of a head count of victims or a question of whose loss was larger. In fact, Stalin killed more people than did the Nazis.19 But that is not the issue. The equivalences offered by these historians are not analogous to the Holocaust. To attempt to say that all are the same is to engage in historical distortion. To suggest that the disastrous U.S. policies in Vietnam or the former Soviet Union’s illegal occupation of Afghanistan were the equivalent of genocide barely demands a response. These invalid historical comparisons are designed to help Germans embrace their past by telling them that their country’s actions were no different than those of countless others—an effort that at times disturbingly parallels much of what we have seen in this book.
But this is not the only way these historians tried to reshape the past. Unlike the deniers, who seek to exonerate Hitler, some of these German historians tend to blame the worst excesses of Nazis, including the Holocaust, on him alone. Thus Nazism becomes “Hitlerism,” and the German populace is absolved. They also depict the Holocaust as a German response to external threats. As we have seen above, Nolte, echoing David Irving, argues that the Nazi “internment” of Jews was justified because of Chaim Weizmann’s September 1939 declaration that the Jews of the world would fight Nazism. This, Nolte argues, convinced Hitler of his “enemies’ determination to annihilate him.” Klaus Hildebrand, a Nolte defender, praised Nolte’s essay as “trailblazing.”20 As I noted in chapter 6, this comparison lacks all internal logic. First of all Weizmann had no army, government, or allies with which to wage this war. World Jewry was not a national entity capable of mounting an offensive against the Nazis. Moreover, Hitler did not initiate his oppression of the Jews in September 1939 when Weizmann made his statement. Weizmann’s statement was a reaction to six years of brutal Nazi oppression. In another attempt at immoral equivalence, Nolte contends that just as the American internment of Japanese Americans was justified by the attack on Pearl Harbor, so too was the Nazi “internmerit” of European Jews. In making this comparison Nolte ignores the fact that, however wrong, racist, and unconstitutional the U.S. internment of the Japanese, the Jews had not bombed Nazi cities or attacked German forces in 1939. Even his use of the term internment to describe what the Germans did to the Jews whitewashes historical reality.
In his most recent work, The European Civil War, 1917–1945, Ernst Nolte comes dangerously close to validating the deniers. Without offering any proof, he claims that more “Aryans” than Jews were murdered at Auschwitz. According to Nolte this fact has been ignored because the research on the Final Solution comes to an “overwhelming degree from Jewish authors.” He described the deniers’ arguments as not “without foundation” and their motives as “often honorable.” The fact that among the core deniers were non-Germans and some former inmates of concentration camps was evidence, according to Nolte, of their honorable intentions. Nolte even advanced the untenable notion that the 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which Heydrich and a group of prominent Nazis worked out the implementation of the Final Solution, may never have happened. He disregards the fact that participants in that meeting have subsequently attested to it and that a full set of minutes survived. This suggestion implies that if Wannsee was a hoax, many other Holocaust-related events that we have been led to believe actually happened may also be hoaxes. He suggests, in an argument evocative of Butz’s analysis, that the Einsatzgruppen killed numerous Jews on the Eastern Front because “preventive security” demanded it since a significant number of the partisans were Jews. While he acknowledges that the action may have been carried to an extreme, it remains essentially justified.21 Another of his unsubstantiated charges was that the documentary film Shoah demonstrates that the SS units in the death camps “were victims in their way too.”22
Coming from a denier these arguments would have been utterly predictable. Coming from Nolte they are especially disturbing and revealing. Nolte cannot be ignorant of the vast body of research on this topic that has been conducted by scholars of every religious persuasion and nationality, including his fellow German non-Jews. Nor, since he tries to defend them, can he be ignorant of the deniers’ explicit antisemitism. In his writings he has too often referred to the reality of the Final Solution to be accused of espousing Holocaust denial. Yet his recent writings make him so palatable to the deniers that the IHR is seriously attempting to convince Nolte to participate in its meetings and address its conventions. Whether he will do so is not known. (Even if he came and told them that the Holocaust is a fact, he would be welcomed as David Irving was during his predenial days, and as the author of popular, demi-historical works, John Toland, is today. They offer a legitimacy the deniers can currently find nowhere else.)
This attempt to resurrect German history was intensely criticized both within Germany and abroad. The historians’ debate harmed the reputations of the scholars most prominently involved in it, and even the president of Germany eventually spoke out against this trend. Why, then, should it be a matter of concern? Despite widespread criticism, the debate gave the German media and general public the imprimatur to conduct the kind of discussion about contemporary Germany’s relationship to its past that would never have been heard before. Calls for a “sanitized version” of German history appeared in Germany’s most prominent newspapers.23 Those involved in the current antiforeigner campaign in Germany find this perspective on history particularly inviting. If Germany was also a victim of a “downfall,” and if the Holocaust was no different from a mélange of other tragedies, Germany’s moral obligation to welcome all who seek refuge within its borders is lessened.
These historians are not crypto-deniers, but the results of their work are the same: the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction and between persecuted and persecutor. Ultimately the relativists contribute to the fostering of what I call the “yes, but” syndrome.24 Yes, there was a Holocaust, but the Nazis were only trying to defend themselves against their enemies. Yes, there was a Holocaust, but most Jews died of starvation and disease (as is the case in every war) or were killed as partisans and spies. Yes, there was a Holocaust, but the Jews’ behavior brought it on them. Yes, there was a Holocaust, but it was essentially no different than an array of other conflagrations in which innocents were massacred. The question that logically follows from this is, Why, then, do we “only” hear about the Holocaust? For the deniers and many others who are “not yet” deniers, the answer to this final question is obvious: because of the power of the Jews. “Yes, but” is a response that falls into the gray area between outright denial and relativism. In certain respects it is more insidious than outright denial because it nurtures a form of pseudohistory whose motives are difficult to identify. It is the equi
valent of David Duke without his robes.
Relativism, however convoluted, sounds far more legitimate than outright denial. These German historians have created a prototype that may prove useful for the deniers. In the future, deniers may adopt and adapt a form of relativism as they attempt to move from well outside the parameters of rational discourse to the fringes of historical legitimacy. Rather than engage in outright denial they will espouse more opaque quasi-historical arguments that confuse well-meaning and historically ignorant people about their motives.1*
Denial aims to reshape history in order to rehabilitate the persecutors and demonize the victims. What relativism seeks to do is not that different. It, too, attempts to rehabilitate the perpetrators, and if in the course of that rehabilitation a certain re-evaluation of the victims occurs, so be it.2* In the years to come, as relativism increasingly becomes the deniers’ protective veneer, distinguishing between these two groups may grow more difficult.
If Holocaust denial has demonstrated anything, it is the fragility of memory, truth, reason, and history. The deniers’ campaign has been carefully designed to take advantage of those vulnerabilities. While there is no precise means of gauging their success, there are enough signs on the horizon—many of which I have examined in the previous pages—to offer some assessment. Right-wing nationalist groups in Germany, Italy, Austria, France, Norway, Hungary, Brazil, Slovakia, and a broad array of other countries, including the United States, have adopted Holocaust denial as a standard facet of their propaganda.25 Whereas these groups once justified Nazi murder of the Jews, now they deny it. Once they argued that something quite beneficial to the world happened at Auschwitz. Now they insist that nothing did. Their antisemitism is often so virulent that the logical conclusion of their argument is that though Hitler did not murder the Jews, he should have. Since they are intent on weakening liberal democratic institutions, Holocaust denial constitutes a seminal weapon in their arsenal. Though they have fomented social upheaval and in certain instances caused significant physical harm, the threat posed by these groups is limited because they are so easily identified. Their dress, behavior, and tactics leave no doubt as to who they are. We know them by their shaved heads, leather jackets, tattoos, terror tactics (including murder), swastikas, cries of sieg Heil, and Nazi paraphernalia-laden rallies. They are as identifiable as a group of Ku Klux Klan members fully bedecked in white-sheeted regalia, chanting racist slogans, and carrying a fiery cross through a black neighborhood. They cause havoc and strike justifiable fear into the hearts of their potential victims. But their outward demeanor is like a flashing yellow light warning the innocent passerby of the danger. No one can mistake them for anything but exactly what they are: neofascists, racists, antisemites, and opponents of all the values a democratic society holds dear. The chance of their attracting a wide following from the general public is slim.
The deniers also sport an outward veneer, but rather than expose who they are, it camouflages them. The stripping away of the deniers’ cloak of respectability—which was one of the main objectives of this book—reveals that at their core they are no different from these neofascist groups. They hate the same things—Jews, racial minorities, and democracy—and have the same objectives, the destruction of truth and memory. But the deniers have adopted the demeanor of the rationalist and increasingly avoided the easily identifiable one of the extremist. They attempt to project the appearance of being committed to the very values that they in truth adamantly oppose: reason, critical rules of evidence, and historical distinction. It is this that makes Holocaust denial such a threat. The average person who is uninformed will find it difficult to discern their true objectives. (That may be one of the reasons why Canadian high school teacher James Keegstra was able to espouse Holocaust denial and virulent antisemitic theories for more than a decade without any protest being mounted against him. He made them sound like rational history.)
The deniers will, to be sure, cultivate this external guise of a reasoned approach all the more forcefully in years to come. They will refine this image in an attempt to confuse the public about who they really are. Any public contact with white-power and radical right-wing groups will be curtailed. People without identifiable racist or extremist pasts will be drafted for leadership positions. The Willis Cartos, who have spoken of the need to prevent the “niggerfication” of America, will increasingly recede into the background as their public roles are diminished. Young men and possibly even women (at the moment there are no prominent women deniers) with pseudotraining in history will be sought out to become the symbolic vanguard of the movement. Overt expressions of antisemitism will be restrained so that those who fail to understand that Holocaust denial is nothing but antisemitism may be fooled into thinking it is not.
We have already seen frightening manifestations of the success of this approach on the various campuses where students, faculty, and administrators declared Bradley Smith’s ad not to be antisemitic. If Smith succeeded so easily on campus, imagine the success he might have among groups who are even less accomplished at critical reasoning! This tactic has been particularly successful in Australia and New Zealand, where, under the guise of defending free speech, the Leagues for Rights—which in essence are nothing but Holocaust-denial organizations—have successfully attracted individuals who would normally have eschewed antisemitic activities. This strategy is behind some deniers’ calls for a change in the IHR’s methodology. They argue that it should place less emphasis on the Holocaust and instead make it only one among the many “hoaxes” they address. This call does not stem from a genuine broadening of their interests or a lessening of their obsession with Jews. It is rooted in their desire to achieve some academic legitimacy. As long as they appear to be consumed with this single issue, that respectability and acceptance will elude them. What they project as a widening of their interests is merely a tactic designed to gain access to the mainstream.
A strategic change will also mark the activities of the racist, neo-Nazi, ultranationalist groups. So easily identifiable by their outer trappings, they will adopt the deniers’ tactics, cast off the external attributes that mark them as extremists, and eschew whatever pigeonholes them as neofascists. They will cloak themselves and their arguments in a veneer of reason and in arguments that sound rational to the American people.3* The physical terror they perpetrate may cease, but the number of people beguiled by their arguments will grow. They will begin to espouse a form of denial that hovers between the relativism of the German historians’ debate and the outright lies seen so often in these pages—a metamorphosis that will make it easier for them to attract new adherents. This pseudorespectability will render them more appealing to a younger, economically disenfranchised segment of the lower middle class, who see themselves living on the brink of failure in the midst of a prosperous society whose benefits are not available to them. This is as true for the United States as it is for Germany, France, and Austria.4*
What, then, are the most efficacious strategies for countering these attacks? Much of the onus is on academe, portions of which have already miserably failed the test. Educators, historians, sociologists, and political scientists hold one of the keys to a defense of the truth. What they who cannot be beguiled by diversionary arguments and soft reasoning know to be fact must be made accessible to the general public.
The establishment of Holocaust museums may play an important role in this effort. These institutions, and all who teach about the Holocaust, must be scrupulously careful about the information they impart so as not inadvertently to provide the deniers with room to maneuver. They must also be careful about “invoking” the Holocaust as a means of justifying certain policies and actions.
This is particularly true for the Jewish community. The purveyors of popular culture—television and radio talk-show hosts prominent among them—must understand that by giving denial a forum they become pawns in a dangerous war.5* As individuals who help shape public opinion, they must recognize that this struggle
is not about ignorance but about hate.
There are those who believe that the courtroom is the place to fight the deniers. This is where Austria, Germany, France, and Canada have mounted their efforts. The legislation that has been adopted takes different forms. Some bills criminalize incitement to hatred; discrimination; or violence on racial, ethnic, or religious grounds. Others ban the dissemination of views based on racial superiority for one sector of the population and expression of contempt toward a group implying its racial inferiority.26
The problem with such legal maneuvers is that they are often difficult to sustain or carry through. In August 1992 the Canadian Supreme Court threw out Zundel’s conviction when they ruled that the prohibition against spreading false news likely to harm a recognizable group was too vague and possibly restricted legitimate forms of speech.27, 6* An even greater difficulty arises when the court is asked to render a decision not on a point of law, as happened in the Mermelstein case, but on a point of history, as happened in the Zundel trial, in which the judge took historical notice of the Holocaust. It transforms the legal arena into a historical forum, something the courtroom was never designed to be. When historical disputes become lawsuits, the outcome is unpredictable.
Denying the Holocaust Page 28